Grand Guignol venue: The Space in the Isle of Dogs.
The story of one of the most feared horror theatres in the world will be told this month in a production at The Space, an arts centre in a formerly derelict church in the Isle of Dogs.
The Grand Guignol, written by East End playwright Francis Kobayashi, chronicles the story of the titular Parisian theatre that was also known as “the theatre of fear and terror”.
However, the production will concentrate on the history of the theatre itself, rather than just on the macabre and bloody scenes in which it specialised.
Tales will be told by characters including Maxa, the “most assassinated woman in the world”, and Andre Lorde, the “Prince of Terror”.
Hardcore horror fans fear not though – director Adam Hemming says that there will “definitely be some blood” in some of the shorter scenes of the play, but he adds that the theatre itself is the focus.
“It will be about the real life stories of the actors and staff, not just recreating the blood and gore of the theatre’s plays,” he says. “In the early days of the theatre the plays were much more about putting the lower classes and criminals on stage to perform.
“The history of the place is what the play will be focused on. It’s larger than just blood and gore.”
The Grand Guignol is on at The Space, 269 Westferry Road, E14 3RS until 2 November.
If you’re still mourning the end of the summer festival season then fear not, as this month Oxjam, the UK’s largest charity festival, has put together impressive line-ups for its Shoreditch and Dalston Takeover events.
The two mini-festivals take place over the weekend of 19/20 October and are the culmination of over a month of one-off events and launch gigs organised by volunteers with the aim of raising money for Oxfam.
Nearly 100 bands and DJs are poised with their instruments and equipment to play across a total of 12 venues. The line-up includes local acts such as Tâches, Ligers, Sophie Jamieson, Milk Teeth and Zoe LDN.
Mohammed Yahya, one half of Afrobeat hip-hop duo Native Sun, who headline Bedroom Bar on Sunday 20 October, told the Oxjam website why he wanted to get involved. He said:
“I feel that it’s a great way to use our music for a positive cause. We often see musicians on TV promoting a very negative lifestyle, often glamorising sex, drugs, alcohol etc., and like many underground artists we understand the responsibility that we have as musicians and role models as well as the blessing and opportunity to have this platform that can touch people universally.”
Last month’s Oxjam launch gigs and events included speed dating and gin tasting, which the organisers hope will put East Londoners in the mood for this month’s Oxjamming festivities.
Wristbands for the day cost £8-10, and allow you free access to all of the venues.
Spectacular three-dimensional sculptural paintings are the focus of Jonathan Gabb’s solo exhibition, Opera Rose, at the former Victorian florist turned gallery A Brooks Art.
Combining acrylics with PVA glue, Gabb questions the function of paint by deliberately misusing it. Critic Helen Sumpter makes the comparison of Gabb’s work to the “cool colour field paintings of Barnet Newton” and the “gestural action paintings of Jackson Pollock”.
Gabb says: “With a painting, people expect paint on a canvas or pigment in liquid on a flat surface, I’m trying to do something different. I want to transform it into something else – the paint is freed from a fixed surface and can be viewed as an object.”
The artist will be opening the doors to his studio in South London on 6 October for an informal Q&A as part of the Art Licks weekend and arranging an ‘Art Skype’ to allow visitors to join in from afar.
For those who want more of an insider’s view of the exhibition, Gabb will be giving a talk on 7 October to explain the ideas behind his practice and walk visitors through the site-specific installation.
Pigeon maestro Albert Stratton. Photograph: Rachael Getzels
Albert Stratton has 80 pigeons, 56 medals, and two bird sheds. His garden isn’t much bigger than a bus shelter but over the years he’s bred more than 200 of London’s favourite pests.
Once neighbours complained and environmental health was called round – they photographed every inch of his roof and concluded that there weren’t an unsafe number of droppings. “No more than you’d expect for underneath the railway arches anyway,” chips in his wife.
Albert, who is now 84, was once an avid pigeon racer known in clubs up and down London for his sharp eye for a good bird. He lives in the same small, dark-brick house in a cul-de-sac behind the Bethnal Green train lines where he resided during his glory days of playing the sport. “Back then I was a force to be reckoned with!” he exclaims. “All them plaques up there – we boshed them! Cups and everything! We really gave them a run for their money.”
He waves towards his windowsill which is crammed with shiny dove effigies and bird busts. Instead of family photos there’s a keepsake box with the homing pigeons’ ankle rings. When I ask about his children, Albert pauses for a second. “Kids? Oh yeah. I’ve got one pest at university.” The humour passes him right by.
But it’s not that funny anymore. Pigeon racing is a dying sport, and with it, go his friends. “When I started in 1983, there were over 20 of us at the club house. Now there’re only three.” He breathes deeply into the muggy air, made thicker still by the lingering whiff of bird feed and sawdust and lets out a sigh. “It’s just Ixy, Smivvy and me… We just had one die. That’s the trouble.”
During the 1800s, pigeon racing was a flourishing sport. Albert reckons the club-house near Spitalfields Market that Charles Dickens wrote about is the same one he was a member of. “It used to be huge,” he explains. “The Queen is the patron. Her grandfather had lofts out in Sandringham. Mike Tyson does it too you know.” Indeed, the testosterone laced, rough-talking boxer who once bit the ear off an opponent is a devoted ‘pigeon fancier’ – and he’s a hero among racers.
Albert Stratton is a self-made champion. He’s won scores of titles, but he didn’t learn it from a trainer or his family. “As a kid I found a pigeon that got lost in the flats where we lived. No meat on him at all, he’d flown himself out. My dad ain’t a big one for animals but he’d do nothing to hurt ‘em. Built a little box for him, fed it up, got it right again. But he said it belonged to someone else so we let it go but it never went. It stayed. Just kept coming back, right through my bedroom window, for about two years. That’s what intrigued me.”
Two years ago Albert had a stroke. He’s lost the use of one leg and gets around with a walking stick. He has one placed below the stairs and one at the back door next to the lofts. “I spend more time with the pigeons now. It gives me something to do.” As he struggles to step down from the loft step, he lets out a frustrated sigh. Under his breath he mutters, “I tell you, what you don’t want is a stroke. It’s completely debilitating.”
But the pride he takes in his birds hasn’t waned with his strength. “They’re the cleanest animals on the planet!” he proclaims. Ken Livingstone called them ‘flying rats’ and feral birds are well-known carriers of disease. But not kept pigeons. Albert bathes them every other day in a small plastic tray with bath salts – and they love it. The best racing birds fetch thousands. He once paid £500 for a star breed, but he can’t tell his wife.
Homing pigeons can fly 50mph, and the longest races are 600 miles – up to the tip of Scotland. You do lose birds now and then; hawks are ravaging the skies. Let free by ‘do-gooders’ tuts Albert. Safe in their coops, his well-kept prize pets babble away.
Albert once lost a five-time winner – he says it was heartbreaking. “But when you’re standing in your garden and a pigeon you expected at half past arrives on the hour, it really makes your heart pound. You think to yourself, woweee, I’ve really got a good one here.” He whistles the ‘woweee’ and you can feel his pride. Albert is an old man now, but he physically straightens up, puffs up his chest and coos with glee. His pigeons do the same.
Mr Dolan drawing on a Shoreditch Street. Photograph: Rob Weir
So, you think Shoreditch has started losing its edge, having been drowned out over the past couple of years by middle class trendies driving the eccentric and eclectic mix of art, fashion and location lifestyle into corporate regeneration?
Well, not necessarily. For an example of the older Shoreditch look no further than the area’s most notorious street artist.
Former jailbird John Dolan’s debut exhibition took place last month at Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch.
Dolan, 42, has led what he describes as a “rough life” – he has spent time on the streets and has been in and out of HMP Pentonville over the years.
After he rediscovered a long neglected gift as an artist he began creating a series of finely drawn, detailed monochrome cityscapes that he then posted to famous street artists around the world who added their own splashes of colour to the drawings.
Before the doors to Dolan’s exhibition opened to a mass of fellow artists and collaborators, local film directors and industry peers, I chatted to John about what landed him in jail and his ambitions for the future.
When did you first start getting recognised?
About two months after sitting down in the street I got published in Shoreditch Unbound, which was around September 2012.
How did you end up in prison?
I used to suffer from depression, years ago. I was looking after my granddad for about seven years and I started to break into sandwich shops, bars, and offices. I knew the places that kept money in them at weekends, so I’d steal cash so I could go on shopping sprees in the West End. Bit of retail therapy to cheer myself up, that was it, basically.
What are your future ambitions?
To have a show in New York.
Do you think living on the street has shaped you in a positive way?
Any hardship in life makes you a better person and make you respect yourself.
Detail from ‘We Are Best Friends’ by Nataliia Taranukha
A mixed-media showcase of work exploring and questioning the interplay between art, belief and identity will take place at Red Gallery, Rivington Street, from 2-14 October.
The fifth annual Urban Dialogues exhibition, organised by Three Faiths Forum (3FF), will feature the work of 20 artists and includes four nights of events.
The show is about bringing people together who may not normally meet, challenging their thinking and providing a platform for discussion, whatever their philosophy. There are two specially commissioned collaborations by artists from different backgrounds, which 3FF Exhibition Organiser Abi Girling says are always very exciting and receive a very strong response.
Group installation The Fury Jukebox, by female artists Zena Edwards, Rasheeda Nalumoso, Cherelle Skeete and Kate Pearson, is a ‘vehicle of discussion’ reflecting on women’s and girls’ anger, and Walls Have No Sides by David Borrington and Aithan Shapira aims to challenge our concept of walls and boundaries. Both collaborations will be documented through an online, interactive film.
Girling says the exhibition provides an “independent, open space where everyone is on an equal footing. It’s open to everyone and enables freer dialogue.”
Since 2009, she has seen “the audience grow as well as pushing into new ones” with events such as the women only Female Voices on 10 October and the launch of an intercultural choir at their Shoreditch Singathon on 13 October.
Prolific Chinese-British filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo has been the central force behind no less than eleven films and nine novels, and was this year named one of Granta magazine’s twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. She has lived in Paris, Berlin and Beijing, but now resides in East London.
This month sees the première at the London Film Festival of the artist’s latest documentary film, Late At Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness.
Capturing the human cost of capitalism, Late At Night… focuses on the stories of those who inhabit East London, many of them immigrants, and hints at the personal and physical struggles they face to reach these shores.
A beguiling mixture of character study, archival material, old news reports, snippets of literary sources, and a surprising choice of soundtrack – from firebrand British-Jamaican ‘dub poet’ Linton Kwesi Johnson to the ubiquitous king of Nigerian Afrobeat, Fela Kuti – the documentary explores issues of alienation, a theme already touched on with her novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
“The film is really an impressionistic mosaic of people from the area”, she says. “It is about those voices we barely listen to in day-to-day life, like street people, for instance. We live amongst them yet we barely talk to them”.
Living in East London she describes as a “rough and complicated experience”: “I don’t find it easy to live around here,” Xiaolu admits, hinting at her own sense of alienation from her surroundings. She says: “I think urban environments in big cities are the most alienated spaces on Earth. I find it extremely unsettling in this country that people pay so much attention to the Royal Family’s wedding and big celebrities’ private life, yet have so little interest in looking at the vast underclass of society – street people, beggars, and working-class people who are everywhere in our neighbourhood.”
Describing her ability to combine artistic disciplines as a filmmaker, producer, scriptwriter, poet, and novelist, Xiaolu says: “I cannot stay still. I do enjoy the differences between these media, but I cannot see myself as a professional filmmaker in the sense that I don’t trust the film industry these days at all. Too much fake stuff and bubbles. Vanity and media power seem to swallow the truth of cinema – when I say cinema, I don’t mean mono-cinema Hollywood.”
Instead, Xiaolu’s work feels rooted in reality, away from the glamour and excess of the film industry. She remains a real outsider artist.
Late at Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness is showing at Rich Mix on 10 October at 6.30pm as part of the BFI London Film Festival.
Paper craic: Learn origami and have a tipple in a tipi
The Queen of Hoxton is launching the second annual origami workshop season in their pop-up rooftop tipi The WigWam on 22 October.
Run by Sam Tsang of Sesame’s Origami School, the monthly workshops invite origami beginners, experts and enthusiasts to learn the ancient art of paper folding.
Materials are all provided in the 90 minute sessions and a free glass of mulled wine, spiced cider or hot buttered rum is included in the ticket price.
Sam, 37, lives in West London and has been teaching origami for six years after receiving emails asking for tutorage. He was originally selling his origami flowers online.
He says: “I first got into origami like everyone else, folding paper aeroplanes at school.”
However it was learning to fold a flapping bird that started his interest.
Now he runs public and corporate workshops, recently teaching origami to over 200 people at the 2013 Thames Festival. He also folded “origami shoes” with New Look at London Fashion Week.
For those apprehensive about origami, Sam says: “There’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s only paper.”
The Queen of Hoxton 1-5 Curtain Road EC2A 3JX
queenofhoxton.com
Supa: The Harlem Globetrotters game. Photograph: Museum of Childhood
Featuring an array of pop cultural figures and figurines, Afro Supa Hero is an exhibition by graphic designer and art director Jon Daniel offering a unique window into African Caribbean life in 1960s and 70s London.
It maps the influences of popular and less widely known black cultural heroes, at a time when the scattered population in London could not find the icons they sought in England.
The collection commemorates the transitional journey to adulthood of a boy who looked for inspiration from black role models in African-American culture, as well as figures from his own family background.
Daniel was inspired to display the figures and comics after a post about his collection on the Creative Review website received a great deal of positive feedback.
It hasn’t been an easy collection to build. He says: “It’s taken 20 years, and some of the pieces took a long while to get hold of and were quite pricey!”
Running in concurrence with Black History Month, the exhibition showcases classic 1970s action figures such as Mr T along with historical personalities such as Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali.
Also on display are a range of games and comics from the period, including Lobo that featured the first lead African American character to appear in a comic book.
However, it is not just the cultural and comic book figures from the exhibition to which Daniel attributes his personal development. A photograph of his brother also features. He says it was a combination of familial and cultural icons that influenced him.
This synthesis of characters allows for a strong embodiment not just of the era, but of the artist they helped shape.
Afro Supa Hero will be at the V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA, until 9 February 2014.
